Amy Dockser Marcus sat down Sunday night to reread her six-story series nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
In rereading the stories and the responses from readers, she said she was reminded that her work as a journalist was about the readers and not winning major awards.
However, winning the Pulitzer Prize Monday was great, but Marcus told students Tuesday that the more important issue was touching people's lives.
Marcus, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, came to Ball State to receive the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award.
The Ball State journalism department selected Marcus as the recipient for the award before anyone knew she had won the Pulitzer Prize, Marilyn Weaver, journalism department chairwoman, said.
Weaver said she hoped students noticed the human touch Marcus had in the series of stories.
"I hope they heard her passion," Weaver said. "I hope they heard it in her voice."
Marcus, a graduate of Harvard University, wrote her award-winning series on "life lived after cancer" for The Wall Street Journal as a part of her health beat.
"I did six stories for the cover, and I found each story in a different way," she said.
Each story featured a different person or family with a broader theme as the focus, and she worked on them for months while also working on her regular beat stories, she said.
Junior Mark Amones said the whole process Marcus used to write her stories and to gather information was done effectively because she found the broader story.
"She wasn't necessarily after one specific story. She was able to go out, listen to people and take something away from it," he said.
One of the young men she wrote about passed away eight months after her story was published, Marcus said.
"They were so emotionally wrenching," she said. "We had a relationship that grew and developed over time. I think I shared a lot of myself with them. It was a conversation."
Marcus said she sometimes felt guilty when working on her stories because she would call people while they were under painful circumstances such as sick in the hospital.
People were willing to talk to her, however, because they believed in the power the newspaper had to help get their story out there, she said.
"They believed in the power of telling their story. It was worth time, it was worth pain, it was worth everything," Marcus said. "Each of them made a decision in embarking on this that they were going to be open."
Marcus said she received large amounts of feedback from readers.
"Every single story generated so much e-mail, so much feedback, it was amazing," she said. "It was like we reached some sort of invisible cord. The readers were just waiting for someone to be open about this."
After working on these stories and meeting these people, material things aren't important anymore, Marcus said.
"It's made me less concerned about superficial things," she said.
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